IDLE Battery Life

Some tiggit mail users have been experimenting with tiggit’s IMAP IDLE functionality. One of their concerns is that the BlackBerry battery life is severely compromised as a result of enabling IDLE.

I have started running a test to benchmark the impact of maintaining an IDLE session on battery life.

The test is set up as follows. I have a BlackBerry Curve 8210 that uses GPRS over Vodafone in the UK, on a regular data package. It is running tiggit mail 0.1.48 and is connecting to gmail over IMAP. Obviously tiggit has useIDLE set and has no value in idleRefresh – so it is using the default.

I also need to simulate email activity and so have set up a cron job on a webserver to send an email to my gmail account five times an hour on an irregular schedule. Actually at these minutes past the hour 10,20,40,45 and 47.

I started the test running at 11:00 this morning with a fully charged battery, and it is now nearly 3pm, and the battery shows about 5% used. (I guess a tool to tell me precisely how much battery has been used would be handy, and should only take a few minutes to write.)

As an aside, there have been a few questions about data use, so this test will probably be repeated with some additional data use tracking enabled in the code.

UPDATE At 8pm: I have written a little tool that tells me the battery use reported by the handheld. After 9 hours of running in IDLE mode, the BlackBerry Curve is reporting 83% battery.

UPDATE At 11pm: The Curve has been running for 12 hours in IDLE mode, and the battery is reporting 77%. I have shutdown the test for now, and turned off the BlackBerry for now.

No UPDATE on Monday, as I have been fixing packaging issues all day. Will restart the tests tomorrow.

tiggit mail

tiggit mail is an IMAP, POP3 and SMTP client for BlackBerry. It allows access to major internet and email service providers such as AOL, Google Mail, mac.com and Yahoo! mail. tiggit mail is suitable for most BlackBerry handhelds, and works on both corporate and personal devices.

Latest Version

The latest general available version of tiggit mail is
1.1.19.0

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